You may be talking about different (albeit inter-related) things - throttling, temperature, and core threading.
You may be seeing the effects of either the kernel's interaction with the cpu's throttling mechanism, the bios ACPI, or KDE's power management application. With throttling enabled, the cpu will respond to demand by increasing the voltage which will in turn increase the temperature. You indicated in your first post that you "need full power"; if so but you also want to conserve battery, then "ondemand" is the correct scaling policy. You should expect to see the processors throttled down unless the cpu needs more power to perform the requested task. Throttling can move very fast, although of course under full load the processor will be pegged at its maximum. In the still unresolved bug report ref'd in Heinz reply, there are some tools listed with which you can see the actual governor settings and detailed throttling results as it occurs. From that bug report there is suspicion that there may be a kernel bug but there is also the possibility that the problem is related to how the bios is handling ACPI; unfortunately bios bugs particularly re ACPI are not that uncommon so it wouldn't hurt the check for a bios update for your machine. If throttling is not working properly for you and there is no bios update, I would suggest following that bug thread (if it's in the kernel, it is serious) until a solution if found. If you can manage w/o throttling for a time, you can disable it altogether in the kernel by adding "cpufreq=no" to the kernel boot line - judging from a couple of the posts in the bug thread, you may need to do that to get above an incorrectly imposed limit.
I used to use "performance", which used to stay on 2.4 GHz, but then I experienced a bug, where it stayed on 1.2 GHz, and switching to "ondemand" just repaired that. So it seems that there is a bug, but by just switching back and forth it can be resolved.
Re temperature, that is driven by core load not the other way around.
I just made a hypothesis, which could explain the experimental fact that for the first day or so tasks are only distributed to 2 processors (mostly), while then, "suddenly", it starts working as expected, and this alwayed happened at the same time when temperature monitoring started working.
As load is put on the processor, voltage is increased to raise clock which in turn generates the greater heat. I don't know Bubblemoon so I can't comment on its temperature reading method. It is conceivable that it is getting its temperature from ACPI (which if itself is a problem as hypothesized in the above bug report, I suppose could also affect the temp readings), from a cpu socket sensor, or from a thermal sensor embedded in the cpu itself; when the sensors package is being used for readings sometimes the algorithm needs to be adjusted (in the config file) for a particular machine. I use AMD processors, with which there have been hardware issues in the past with the internal thermal sensor as well as the sensor driver in the sensors package (since resolved). I don't know if there are any such issues with Intel. So in other words, temp variations could be due to the throttling issue, or not; could also be due to where/how Bubblemoon gets its readings. I would compare to what the sensors package reports.
Re distribution of processes on the cores, my reply would be the same as Larry's. Note in your cpuinfo the number of cores is 2, not 4. Your i5 is essentially 2 dual-cores bolted together; that is a different architecture than a true quad. As already noted, the kernel will allocate load differently on the latter vs the former.
As I explained in my other e-mail, for the jobs I'm running, after that initial phase it's over, I get the power of 4 independent processors (for what I'm running). So from my perspective I would just like to know how to skip that initial phase. But perhaps nobody knows.
Nothing above is a definitive answer, but hopefully helps a bit.
Yes, thanks! Oliver -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org